


About Emil, and how he picked up a little Finnish

by Minutia_R



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Angst, Awkward Sex, Breaking Up & Making Up, Denial of Feelings, First Time, Hurt/Comfort, Language Barrier, M/M, Masturbation, Pining, Platonic Bed-sharing, Serious Injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-09
Updated: 2016-07-14
Packaged: 2018-06-07 07:14:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6792850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minutia_R/pseuds/Minutia_R
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So first of all, it’s totally not weird to watch your night scout sleeping.</p><p>Second, it's not weird to pick up a few words of a language when you hear it all the time.</p><p>And finally, Emil really, really doesn't have a crush on Lalli.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Eternal gratitude to my wonderful beta, Kiraly, and my expert Finnish consultant, Lei. All the Finnish is hers, and she also deserves at least 75% of the credit for the English rendering of Emil's less-than-successful attempts at Finnish.
> 
> I started writing this during the break before chapter 11, so I'm just going to consider it an AU from there.
> 
> The warnings and ratings reflect the eventual content of the story, but the tags I'll be adding as I go.

So first of all, it’s totally not weird to watch your night scout sleeping.

(The rest of the crew call Lalli a mage. Honestly, Norwegians are so superstitious, and Finns are worse, and it will be a hot day before Emil trusts a single thing Mikkel says again. And Reynir’s opinion--whatever it is--doesn’t count. He’s not even properly part of the crew, and until like a month ago he’d never left his sheep farm in the middle of nowhere.)

The point is, Emil--like any rational and civilized person--doesn’t believe in magic or mages, but Lalli is a good scout, even if he really should tell people where he’s going and what he's planning to do more often. Which is one reason someone needs to keep an eye on him. What if he woke up and decided to leave and Tuuri drove off before anyone noticed? 

Also, Lalli sleeps a lot. True, he's usually awake when Emil’s asleep; even so, it’s a lot. He gets sick sometimes--or at least, when Emil asked if he was sick, Tuuri gave an infuriatingly indifferent shrug and said it was something like that. Emil knows that she thinks it has something to do with the whole mage business, but she's Lalli’s cousin and she ought to look after him. Well, if she won't, then Emil will.

Lalli has nightmares sometimes too. There was definitely that one time he woke up screaming. Emil didn't see much combat while he was with the cleansers, but two years was long enough to learn about nightmares, about how important it is to have someone you know with you when you wake up, saying the sort of calming nonsense where it barely matters what language it’s in--

And sleep smooths the sharp, angular grace of Lalli’s face and limbs into something softer, almost peaceful. When he's asleep, Emil can watch him without him darting out of sight, into a different compartment of the tank, or behind a tree or broken-down wall. Either that, or returning Emil’s glance with an unsettling, too-long stare, the kind that feels like a judgment, and like Emil’s come up short.

The point is, thoughts of how good Lalli looks, and wondering whether it would wake him up if Emil brushed that lock of hair out of his face, are certainly not what's occupying Emil’s mind when Mikkel rudely interrupts with a demand for Emil to help him with something or other.

“I'm keeping an eye on Lalli!” Emil calls back.

Emil can't quite make out Mikkel’s response, partly because he’s shouting from outside but mostly because Emil still finds Danish largely incomprehensible. The gist is that Lalli’s not going anywhere, and the cat will let them know if anything’s wrong, and Emil should . . . stop mooning around?

“What?” Emil says indignantly.

“I said,” says Mikkel, sticking his head into the sleeping compartment and enunciating slowly and carefully. Which to be fair is the only way Emil can understand him, but the way he does it makes it clear he thinks Emil is a moron. “Move your lazy butt and come help me with the laundry.”

“Oh,” says Emil, obscurely relieved. “I’ll be back soon,” he adds to Lalli, and even though Lalli wouldn't understand him even if he were awake, he snuffles and turns onto his other side as if in response.

It isn't until Emil is setting up the drying lines that it occurs to him that he really should have protested when Mikkel called him lazy--because he isn't lazy--but bringing it up now would just be weird. So he’ll let it go this time.

#

By the time Emil reaches the top of the hill, puffing a bit, Lalli is already halfway down the other side. Which is why Emil sees the beast first.

It’s a brief flicker of color and motion in the streetlamp above Lalli’s head. It might be a healthy squirrel. It might be nothing. “Lalli!” Emil calls softly, not wanting to alert everything that might be lurking in the city to their presence. It’s a suburb built towards the end of the old world, Tuuri says, full of crap building and not nearly as troll-infested as Copenhagen proper. Still.

He doesn’t need to be any louder. He hasn’t gotten the second syllable of Lalli’s name out before Lalli is drawing his knife, whirling--in the wrong direction. Emil can see the beast more clearly now, dropping from the lamp, too many legs to be anything Sigrun would want him to bring home for dinner. “Vasemmallasi!” he says.

The word seems to come out of Emil’s mouth without passing through his brain first. He doesn’t remember learning it. But it works: Lalli turns smoothly, his knife flashes, and a body hits the ground with a muffled thump. Lalli stops to collect what he’s brought down before looking back at Emil like Emil’s grown another head.

Well, no. If Emil had grown another head, Lalli would be coming for him with the knife. Instead, he looks at Emil like he’s just done something strange. Which is a bit much, coming from Lalli.

“What?” says Emil. “I picked it up. I’ve been hearing enough Finnish, some of it was bound to rub off.”

Not that he picked up much Icelandic during his brief and inglorious school career, and that had been a required subject. But this is different--no one’s life has ever depended on Emil knowing a few words of Icelandic.

And of course, he’s only justifying himself to himself, because Lalli doesn’t understand a word. “Kuulostat siltä kuin pureskelisit kuolleita lehtiä. Ja minä olisin kohta nähnyt tuon itsekin,” he says. And then he adds, “Kiitos,” which is a word Emil does know, though he’s never heard Lalli use it before. But Tuuri thanks people sometimes.

Before Emil can try to remember how to respond, Lalli is off again, further down the road. Emil stays behind. They have to meet back with Sigrun in ten minutes, but if Tuuri’s going to be bringing the tank down this way, he should burn out anything nesting along it first. There’s nothing here, though, no other beasts and no nest, and after a few seconds he follows Lalli.

He really should learn some more Finnish. He can ask Tuuri to teach him. She has plenty of free time; she probably won’t mind.

#

A few days later, Emil is sitting up in the cab with Tuuri while she drives. Reynir, on the other side of him, is mending a tear in one of Sigrun’s jackets, humming to himself and occasionally muttering a few words in Icelandic.

“Olen loukkaantunut,” Emil repeats, and then adds, “I’m flattered that you think the first thing I’m going to do when I get back in the field is get myself hurt.”

“Hey, it happens. Just ask Sigrun,” says Tuuri. “And it’s a useful thing to be able to say. Or to understand, if Lalli says it. That’s why you wanted to learn Finnish, right--so you could communicate with Lalli when you’re off together?”

Lalli getting injured isn’t actually any more fun to think about than Emil himself getting injured, but Tuuri’s right. “Of course.”

“So you’re going to want to be able to tell him where you’re injured, so we can do body parts next--” Emil sits up straighter, and Tuuri smirks. “Yeah, I thought you’d like that one better. Listen, Emil, I don’t think this thing with you and Lalli is going to work out.”

“Then tell Sigrun to stop running off and leaving us together,” says Emil stiffly. “She’s probably not going to listen to you, but--”

Tuuri rolls her eyes. “Not what I meant. I can see that you’ve got a crush on Lalli, but I don’t think he’s looking for a boyfriend.”

“Are you trying to tell me that Lalli isn’t interested in men?” says Emil. Not that it makes any difference either way.

“I’m trying to tell you that I’m pretty sure Lalli isn’t interested in anybody. You remember when we first met you, right, and Lalli wouldn’t shake your hand? Yeah, he was pretty tired and seasick at the time, but it wasn’t just that. When was the last time you saw him touch anyone voluntarily? So what makes you think he’s going to want to bump uglies?”

Emil shrugs, because he remembers, vividly, every time Lalli patted his head or fluffed up his hair. But it’s not like that’s happened very often, and besides, trying to figure out how to say it to Tuuri makes it sound a little ... odd.

“I’m telling you this,” Tuuri goes on, “because you’re my friend and I don’t want to see you get hurt. And Lalli doesn’t have a lot of patience for people who annoy him.”

“He’s had enough patience for me so far. So either I’m not as annoying as you think I am, or he’s nicer than you think he is. And anyway,” Emil adds, “I don’t have a crush on Lalli.”

“Sure. But look, are you sure you don’t want to learn Icelandic instead? It’ll be more useful when all this is over, and also, you’d be able to talk to Reynir.” Tuuri tilts her head towards the other end of the cab, a speculative gleam in her eye. “He’s pretty cute, isn’t he, with the hair and freckles and all? Taller than Lalli, too.”

Involuntarily, Emil follows her gaze. Reynir has finished with the jacket and is looking out the window. They’ve left the last of the suburbs behind; there’s still a few old-world population centers Sigrun wants to hit between here and the Great Belt, but for now it’s a lot of trees and snow. Reynir is staring at them as if they’re the most fascinating thing he’s ever seen, and not at all like he knows that Tuuri is talking about him like a piece of meat. Comparing Lalli to him is frankly insulting.

“If you think he’s so cute why don’t you hook up with him yourself? But then you might get pregnant and since neither of you is immune that’d just be one more useless non-immune baby in the world, I guess.”

Tuuri’s smile gets wider and pointier, and Emil realizes that she can be just as unnerving in her way as her cousin. Also that he should really maybe think about things before he says them. “For your information, there are plenty of fun things that a woman can get up to with a man that won’t leave her pregnant,” she says. “But also, Mikkel has condoms in his medical supplies. You should know that in case you do get lucky with Lalli, because I don’t want you giving him any filthy Swedish diseases.”

“I don’t have any filthy Swedish diseases!” Emil yelps, loudly enough that Reynir looks over with his forehead wrinkled in concern. “Because there aren’t any,” Emil concludes in a whisper.

“Right,” says Tuuri. “And you’re not getting lucky with Lalli anyway.”

Emil closes his eyes, beats his head softly against the back of his seat, and says, “Can we please get back to the Finnish lessons?”

Tuuri doesn’t answer right away; she looks Emil over for a few seconds, uncharacteristically solemn. Emil isn’t sure what she’s looking for, or what she finds, but eventually she taps herself on the head and says, “Pää.”

“Pää,” Emil repeats. “Head?”

“Right,” says Tuuri. She opens her hand, and says, “Käsi.” Points to her shoulder: “Olkapää.” And then, because she’s keeping one eye on the road after all, shouts, “Puu!” leans hard on the steering wheel, and manages, with a sickening lurch, to avoid a collision.

So Emil figures he’s either learned the word for tree or a very useful swear.

#

And Emil should really, _really_ , maybe think about things before he says them. Because now Tuuri has taken his advice about Reynir. At least, he’s always up front with her when she’s driving nowadays, sitting too close with their legs casually rubbing up against each other, or resting his head on top of hers, his braid trailing down over her shoulder. Emil didn’t think either of them could get more disgustingly cheerful than they were before, but they _have_. At least he can’t understand them cooing to each other in Icelandic.

Sigrun could put a stop to it if she wanted, maybe, but she doesn’t seem inclined. She offered Tuuri a fist-bump the first time the two of them stumbled out of quarantine wearing each other’s breath masks. “Nice to see you’ve found a use for that extra crate of supplies, my fuzzy-haired friend,” she said, and gave Reynir’s braid a tug. Reynir’s freckles nearly got lost in his blush at Tuuri’s under-the-breath translation, but he was grinning, too.

Mikkel grumbles, but Sigrun informs him loftily, “When you’ve commanded as many troops as I have, you’ll learn that it’s best to let the young hotheads get this sort of thing out of their systems.”

Emil suspects that Sigrun has reached some conclusions about how far Tuuri will obey her orders if she chooses to make an issue of it. Also, he suspects Sigrun’s enjoying the show.

Not that Tuuri and Reynir are being indiscreet as such. And it’s not that they have that much time alone, either. But Lalli goes out almost every night, and Sigrun and Emil often, and Mikkel occasionally, and if any of them come back with so much as a scratch it’s at least twenty minutes in quarantine for Tuuri and Reynir, which is apparently long enough to get up to plenty of fun things. It just isn’t fair, when Emil doesn’t even get enough privacy to jerk off once in a while.

Reynir mutters in his sleep, and Sigrun snores like a sawmill. Lying awake at night, Emil can’t help but think enviously of Lalli, out on his own in the cool of the forest. And if he happens to find a spot that seems safe to camp tomorrow, there’s nothing to stop him from lingering there for a while, from undoing his trousers and taking a minute to pleasure himself if he feels like it.

Emil can picture it clearly: he’s seen Lalli often enough in various states of undress. The flat muscles of his stomach and the hollows of his hips, his eyes half-closed, his breath coming in irregular puffs of vapor--

With a groan that he manages to smother in his pillow, Emil flops over onto his stomach and rubs himself against the mattress a few times, mortification at the idea of anyone seeing him at it losing temporarily against sheer physical need. He has no idea why he’s thinking about this, but he would like to stop now. 

Finally, he gets out of bed. If he wakes anyone, he’s just going out for a piss, right?

The air outside is shockingly cold once he gets his trousers down, but it doesn’t slow him down much. He keeps his mind carefully blank; tries to think of nothing but the warmth and pressure of his hand, the building pressure at the base of his cock, the part of him that’s satisfied with that. 

It’s all over very quickly. Still, by the time Emil cleans himself off--the water in the barrel outside is freezing--and gets back to bed, he can barely control his shivering. He feels hollow, like someone’s scooped out his insides with a rusty spoon, like he’s going to cry or throw up. But he doesn’t do either. He sleeps, and doesn’t wake up until Lalli comes scratching at the door in the morning.

#

Lalli never smiles. It took Emil a while to work out that it doesn’t mean that Lalli is never happy; smiling just isn’t a shape his face makes. But there’s a particular way his eyebrows fly up when he finds something funny or interesting, a way he sprawls across the nearest horizontal surface, all joints loose, when he’s feeling content.

Now he’s draped himself over the back of Tuuri’s seat, his arm describing wide circles as he points out places on her map, giving his morning report. If anyone else was standing like that, it would mean that they could barely hold themselves upright--and Lalli probably is exhausted. He was out all night, and yesterday’s drive was anything but restful. But he’s also clearly pleased with himself.

“The overpass coming up has collapsed, but there’s a side road that splits off here, and connects back to the main route,” Tuuri says. Emil tries, without much success, to match up her Swedish words with what Lalli’s just said in Finnish. “There’s a good camping spot over here, and we should be able to reach it several hours before sunset, if we get started soon. Nothing that looks dangerous or worth looting on the way, but here--” Tuuri taps an area on the map, “There’s what’s left of an old-world farm. A few buildings still standing on the hill, not worth risking, and down on this slope, some orchards and a pond. Lalli thinks there might even be fish or birds.”

“Good work, twiggy!” Sigrun crows, and Lalli barely flinches when she slugs him on the shoulder. Extra pleased with himself. “Of course, you’d better get started on the supply run now if we want to make camp before nightfall.”

“Oh, come on, Sigrun!” says Emil. “He just got back. He’s falling over.”

Sigrun folds her arms across her chest. “Yeah? You volunteering to go?”

“Well, I--wouldn’t know what to look for,” says Emil.

“Me neither. That’s why it’s got to be sleepyhead here. Look, I know you think I’m just bitching because I can’t stand the slop we’ve been eating--and I’m not saying I wouldn’t stab my sister for a bite of fish around now--but even if we’ve got so many turnips it makes you sick to look at them I can guarantee you they’re not going to last six people and a cat through the winter. If we don’t supplement them with something we are going to starve. And the longer we wait the less there’ll be to find.”

“Oh,” says Emil, because he hasn’t thought about it like that. “But--”

Lalli settles the argument by shrugging back into his jacket, pulling on his hood, and gathering up his rifle and a couple of sacks from by the door. Then he stops, looks over his shoulder at Emil, and crooks his hand in a _come on_ gesture.

“Oh! Just a minute!” Emil dashes around getting his own stuff together, and finds Lalli waiting for him just outside the tank. He wants to say that he’ll try to learn what he’s looking at so that next time maybe he can go and Lalli can sleep, but when he takes a breath and takes the plunge into Finnish, the best he can come up with is, "I try see, and second time I go self and you not."

Whether or not Lalli can make any sense of that, he answers with a short burst of words out of which Emil understands “don’t,” and “Sigrun” (which doesn’t really count) and, incredibly, a whole sentence: “I don’t like porridge either.” He uses the Danish word for porridge and makes it sound like a curse.

Emil has to jog to keep up with Lalli’s long strides, and to keep sight of him through forest much too dense to get the tank through, along no path Emil can see. If he loses Lalli now, he will be _lost_. It doesn’t take them long to get to the old farm site, though Emil doesn’t really notice when they do--it’s just a slight thinning of trees--until he sees the buildings Lalli mentioned on the hill above, wood and glass. They look wrong in this place, like a job poorly finished, but they’re too far away to be a major concern. Lalli checked out the area earlier and he thinks it’s safe, anyway. So Emil tries to put them out of his mind and concentrate on helping Lalli dig, and on trying to figure out which bit of withered vegetation among the leaf litter and frost means that there’s a clutch of potatoes underground, or an onion, or--joy and rapture--another turnip.

Eventually Lalli decides they’ve exhausted the possibilities of root vegetables, and they go on to the fish pond. It’s choked with weeds and rimmed with ice, but too regular and smooth-sided to be natural. There’s some sort of mechanism along the bank. It takes both of them hauling on chains to raise it--a sort of cage, trailing weeds and slime and lined at the bottom with a layer of flopping, gasping fish. Picking them up is gross, but they go into another sack.

Past the pond, the trees change, and there’s an occasional flash of dark red or muted green on the forest floor, a late-fallen apple or pear that’s gone wrinkled instead of eaten or rotted. And then there’s a patch of thornbushes, which Lalli walks right into, because of course he does, his eyebrows flying up in pleasure.

He crouches down in the thorns and comes up with something about the size of his thumb, a more vivid red than the fallen apples they’ve been gathering. He splits it open, flicks out some of the insides, and holds it out to Emil.

“Um,” says Emil.

“You eat it,” says Lalli.

Emil hesitates for a second before reaching out for the--fruit? berry?--and in that second, Lalli closes the distance between them and pops it in Emil’s mouth, his gloved fingers brushing Emil’s lower lip.

It’s so tart it makes Emil’s entire face scrunch up, and at first he thinks Lalli is playing a trick on him, but there’s a burst of sweetness, too, and once the first intensity fades a bit he realizes he recognizes the flavor.

“It’s rosehips!” he says, surprised into Swedish--and also, he doesn’t have the word in Finnish. “We used to have a cook who would make nyponsoppa, and--”

Emil doesn’t get to finish his thought--in fact, whatever it was is lost entirely between one breath and the next, because Lalli is kissing him. There’s a nip of teeth at his lower lip where the impression of Lalli’s glove still lingers, and a swipe of tongue licking the last of the tartness from his mouth, and it’s over before Emil can even kiss back.

“Um. Lalli. You. What do you--” and that’s where Emil gives up, because he doesn’t have words for what he wants to say in any language. He reaches for Lalli, but Lalli shrugs his hand off and goes back to picking rosehips. The only thing Emil can do is join him, and keep bringing his fingers to his mouth every few minutes on their way back to the tank, half-wondering if he imagined the kiss.

Sigrun is delighted with the fish. They have no way of preserving them, but with six people and a cat stuffing themselves sick they don’t last long enough for that to be an issue. Mikkel husbands the fruit more carefully, but a chopped-up apple or a handful of rosehips go a long way towards making the morning porridge more palatable, and cooking mellows the rosehips’ tart bite.

Emil kind of misses it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ETA: In addition to her stellar work as a beta, Kiraly also [drew an illustration](http://worldsentwined.tumblr.com/post/145061457629/happy-birthday) for this story! Marvel at the beauty (and at Emil's utter confusion.)
> 
> ETA 2: Another year, another [Kiraly illustration for this chapter.](http://worldsentwined.tumblr.com/post/160209717209/the-first-of-this-years-birthday-giveaway) <3
> 
> Finnish words and phrases in this chapter:
> 
> Vasemmallasi=on your left  
> Kuulostat siltä kuin pureskelisit kuolleita lehtiä. Ja minä olisin kohta nähnyt tuon itsekin=You sound like you’re chewing a mouthful of dead leaves. And I would have seen that myself in a second  
> Kiitos=Thank you  
> Olen loukkaantunut=I’m injured  
> Pää=head  
> Käsi=hand  
> Olkapää=shoulder  
> Puu=tree


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just so we're clear: I wrote this before Chapter 11 started, okay? Okay.

The night they camp in Halsskov Odde, the rest of them have barely tucked in for the night when Lalli comes back early. His report is terse enough that even Sigrun understands it without translation.

“What do you mean, no?”

“We always knew it was a possibility,” says Tuuri. “I mean, you remember what the Øresund Bridge was like, and they’ve actually been maintaining that one occasionally.”

“Yeah, but you’re a better driver now,” says Sigrun.

“I thought we’d agreed that the Øresund Bridge was _not my fault_? Anyway, we could backtrack and try--”

“Emil!” Sigrun barks. “What happens when we backtrack?”

“Something is waiting in ambush for us,” Emil recites obediently. It sounds like a silly Norwegian superstition, but Emil’s never found it to be actually wrong.

“That’s right! Somebody’s learned something this trip, anyway. No backtracking. Exactly how much no are we talking about, magic-pants?”

Tuuri translates the question, and Lalli answers with a disdainful hiss: he doesn’t say no when he means maybe. If there was a way to cross that bridge, he damn well would have crossed it. Eventually, Tuuri manages to extract a more complete report, but it amounts to the same thing. At least half the structure has disappeared beneath the waves.

Sigrun sighs and turns to Mikkel. “Sorry, big guy, I know you were looking forward to getting your hands on all that science. But it looks like it’s not happening this trip. Maybe next winter we can get some more funding, get ourselves a vehicle big enough to carry a boat.”

“Oooh,” says Tuuri.

“But in order to do that, we’ve got to make this winter pay. Get out your maps, stubby, and let’s see what there is worth looting on the way back to Copenhagen. Hopefully this side trip won’t have been a complete waste of time.”

Sigrun and Tuuri bend over the maps, looking for targets, and Lalli watches, though he doesn’t contribute anything. First Reynir and then Mikkel eventually go back to bed while the discussion is going on. Once they've decided on a tentative route, Tuuri rubs her eyes and stumbles back to the sleeping compartment, and Lalli gets ready to head out again.

At the door of the tank, Emil says, “Be careful, okay?” and gives Lalli’s hood a tug to make it sit right. Lalli lets him, leaning towards Emil fractionally before going out into the night.

“What did you just say?” Sigrun is giving Emil a suspicious squint, and he realizes he’s never spoken Finnish in front of her. He feels self-conscious about it, even though she’s not in a position to criticize his accent or anything.

Then the most appalling look of gleeful enlightenment crosses her face. “Oh! You and the little mage, huh?”

“Why does everyone assume I’ve got a crush on Lalli? Because I really, really--” But Emil is tired, and denying it seems like so much effort anymore. “Yes. A little.”

“Hey!” Sigrun slugs his arm. “Just because the support staff has to do the boring jobs doesn’t mean they should have all the fun in bed, right?”

Emil buries his face in his hands. “Sigrun, no. It isn’t--we haven’t--I don’t think he’s even interested.”

“Well, that sounds like loser talk to me. You heard our pipsqueak tonight--he’s perfectly capable of saying no if he wants to. So if he hasn’t said it, either he doesn’t mean it, or you haven’t asked.” Sigrun shrugs. “Whatever, not my business. I’m going to sleep.”

#

Just outside the city of Kalundborg, there's a manor house which, according to Tuuri’s maps, once held a large private library. It’s an impressive structure, even after everything Emil’s seen in the Silent World, big and solidly-built, with the approaches relatively clear for somewhere that's been abandoned for ninety years. Tuuri parks at a safe distance, and Sigrun, Lalli and Emil go out to investigate. Once they’re inside, Sigrun goes right and Emil and Lalli go left: standard procedure.

They don’t find much. Bedrooms full of bodies, which Emil still hasn’t quite gotten used to. Sigrun’s right, though--they’re not scary, just sad. A kitchen half the size of Siv and Torbjörn’s entire house. A room full of . . . exercise equipment? Emil hopes that Sigrun’s having better luck.

Lalli stops and stiffens, his head coming up like he hears something, or smells something. Emil moves closer and draws his shortsword, but he doesn’t see anything to stab. And suddenly Lalli is running back the way they came, where they left Sigrun, and Emil can hear it, too: splintering wood, labored breathing. Gunfire.

Emil doesn’t have time to wonder what Sigrun’s found that’s made her willing to break out her rifle, because it comes crashing through the wall beside them. A mass of seething red flesh with no discernible anatomy, nothing that looks like a target. Dodging falling bits of house and blindly groping limbs, they keep running, the wall crumbles like paper and Emil sees it.

It’s a giant. Sigrun is there, too, and her rifle must be spent because she’s wielding it like a club, like she hasn’t had enough breathing space to switch out her weapon. A couple of the thing’s heads have been reduced to pulp and ooze, but it doesn’t seem to have slowed it down any, and what is Emil going to do with a shortsword?

Lalli is firing now, gunshots barely louder than the giant’s breathing, and that draws its attention long enough for Sigrun to shoulder her rifle and draw her knife, and to get out of the way of its slicing claws. She can’t get far, though. None of them can; when the wall collapsed it cut off their only line of retreat.

Emil has learned better than to set things on fire unless he’s sure it’s going to kill them. But there is something he can do with his charges, and that’s make an exit. A spark, a few seconds, and the far wall blows outwards, and fresh air blows in. “Run!” he yells, and doesn’t waste time following his own advice, but a sound behind him makes him turn, and he sees--

Lalli scrambling down the giant’s flank--

One of the great heads turning, one of the great, claw-tipped arms slicing downwards--

And Sigrun launches herself towards the giant, throws Lalli clear so that he lands in a heap at Emil’s feet, stabs the thing right in the eye--

And the claw finishes its sweep, straight across Sigrun’s throat.

For a second--less than that, less than the space of a breath--Emil thinks she’s been decapitated. But Lalli is running towards her, and Emil follows him, and she’s still, incredibly, on her feet, and there’s so much blood, and the three of them manage somehow to stumble out into the snow and the light.

The giant is still after them, but the sunlight and cold both slow it down. Outrunning it isn’t hard. What’s hard is keeping Sigrun moving, Emil supporting her on one side, Lalli on the other, but they’re both much shorter than she is, and her arms grip their shoulders weakly. Both her rifle and her sword have been left behind in the manor house. She’s going to be so mad. But she’s breathing, it doesn’t sound quite right but she’s breathing, and one foot goes in front of the other.

Lalli is saying something in Finnish, the words spilling out in a desperate flood, and Emil doesn’t understand any of it. It has a different sound than when Lalli and Tuuri talk to each other, deeper, rhythmic. It might be a prayer. It must be nice, at a time like this, to believe that there’s something out there that listens to prayers.

Finally, they reach the tank. Emil hammers on the door, and Mikkel opens it a crack, then slams it shut, shouting in Icelandic. Probably telling Tuuri and Reynir to get into quarantine. It takes so long, with Sigrun bleeding out on the threshold, and the giant still lumbering after them, but it probably really isn’t more than a minute before Mikkel opens the door again and lifts Sigrun onto her bunk.

“You can fix her, right?” says Emil. “Please, you’ve got to fix her.”

“Breathe,” Mikkel advises, all the attention he has to spare for Emil.

Lalli is having a shouted conversation with Tuuri across the sealed cab door. He’s telling her to drive, and she doesn’t know where to go.

“Decontaminated, let’s get you decontaminated and you can go up front and steer,” Emil says, grabbing Lalli by the shoulder and managing to remember the word for decontamination in Finnish even if the rest of his sentence is in Swedish. Lalli seems to understand, anyway, and doesn’t object to being manhandled through the fastest decontamination Emil’s ever done in his life. From outside, he can hear the sound of gigantically labored breathing getting closer, and when he’s finished, Lalli dives through the cab door and the tank lurches into motion.

On her bunk, Sigrun’s eyes have closed, but her face is anything but peaceful: twisted in pain, drained of all color. At least Mikkel seems to have stopped the worst of the bleeding. Her chest is rising and falling. She’s breathing.

“Finish up your own decon and join the rest of them,” Mikkel tells him. “You’re not going to want to see this.”

“Mikkel, no,” says Emil, thinking of the mother cat.

Mikkel shakes his head. “Get out of here.”

There’s nothing else Emil can do, except throw up, and he’s not going to do that. He’s slow, though, and clumsy, and doing the flash-lamp on yourself is awkward at the best of times, not that Emil would be decontaminating himself at the best of times.

Up in the cab, the view doesn’t make Emil feel like throwing up any less. Tuuri’s knuckles on the steering wheel are white, and she’s taking the tank faster than it really ought to go, through the cramped streets of the old-world city with the sun going down. Emil wants to ask Lalli whether he really knows where he’s going, but you don’t ask Lalli that, and anyway he seems pretty busy. So Emil sits down on the bench out of the way, next to Reynir, who gives him a sympathetic smile from behind his breath mask. Maybe Reynir feels this useless all the time.

There's a thump and a jolt--the tank has hit something, and there are eyes in the twilight city, shadows creeping towards them.

“Drive,” says Lalli.

“Lalli--” says Tuuri unhappily. But she doesn’t argue; she knows as well as anyone that they can’t stay here.

Lalli takes his arms off the back of Tuuri’s seat, rolls his shoulders and stands straight. He looks a bit like when he’s listening for trolls, or whatever it is he does, but--more, somehow. It’s creepy, the way he doesn’t blink.

Suddenly, the street in front of the tank is lit up. Lightning, is Emil’s first nonsensical thought, or the old-world streetlights spontaneously starting to function again. But this light has a shape. It’s like a big cat stalking in front of the tank, and the beasts in the city shy away from its glow. Emil grips the edge of the seat, because Tuuri is pushing the engine to its limits, trying to keep the cat in sight, following where it leads.

It’s Lalli doing this. Somehow. Emil has never believed it, but there’s no other explanation, and besides--the cat has the look of Lalli, the way it walks, the way it tilts its head. And it’s starting to fade as it leads Tuuri down a waterfront street, the ripples on the water catching its glimmering light.

The tank rocks as something hits its side. Tuuri holds grimly to the wheel. The cat leaps into the water--no. It’s the gangplank of a boat tethered to the shore. Then the cat flickers out, and Lalli collapses, and he’s bleeding from his nose and mouth and the corners of his eyes, and Tuuri drives, blind. Emil can tell when they’re on the gangplank by the rattling, and when they reach the boat by the way the floor bobs.

Tuuri parks the tank, grabs a lantern, and runs out, and Emil has to leave Lalli behind and follow her, because she’s not immune and she shouldn’t be outside alone. There’s a big reel of chain in the front of the boat, and Tuuri pulls a lever and the gangplank lifts up, cutting them off from the city. They’ve left the giant and the beasts behind, and set themselves adrift.

#

 

Mikkel has given Sigrun enough painkillers that she's still passed out the next morning. Her face has started to swell and purple, and she has an ugly red line, traced by an uglier row of Mikkel’s stitches, snaking up her neck. But her breathing sounds normal, she's alive, and Mikkel says she’ll be fine.

He also says there's nothing wrong with Lalli. But Lalli hasn't woken up either.

They're not actually adrift. Tuuri managed to anchor them last night; theoretically, she could lower the gangplank and drive back into the city, but without Sigrun and Lalli no one’s anxious to try it. They’re safe enough for now, barring attacks by sea beasts or trolls. Emil did a sweep of the boat as soon as the sun was up. It didn’t take long. The deck is small enough that there’s not much clearance around the tank, there’s the mechanisms for the anchor and the gangplank on the other side, and a tall bit in the middle with storage and a look-out and a bunch of mysterious old-world technology sticking up off the roof.

(Emil doesn’t know much about boats.)

Reynir insisted on coming along for the sweep, and Emil didn’t have the heart to tell him no, plus he’s the only one the cat likes, which is damn ungrateful of her if you ask Emil. Anyway, the cat was the one who dealt with the few small vermin beasts which were the only thing any of them found, while Emil stalked around fingering his shortsword and Reynir scratched symbols onto the rail with a screwdriver.

“Does Tuuri know you’ve got that?” Emil asked him, because they’re Tuuri’s tools and it is, in a way, Tuuri’s boat.

“Tuuri!” Reynir agreed, nodding and unleashing a cheerful stream of Icelandic babble.

Emil asks her about it later, but she’s distracted--she’s found a book on engines in their looted library and is poring over it, comparing the diagrams to their boat’s mechanical guts--and she just says, “Oh, yeah, they’re protective runes. Dunno if they’re any good. Reynir says he saw them in a dream.”

Whatever makes the crazy Icelander happy, Emil thinks. But that’s just reflex. In a world where glowing cats that move like Lalli can lead them through a beast-infested city, maybe what Reynir’s doing is more helpful than anything Emil can do at this point.

Sigrun wakes up around noon, in a foul mood that isn’t helped by the fact that she can’t speak above a whisper or swallow anything but a watered-down version of Mikkel’s porridge. She okays Tuuri’s plan to try and repair the boat’s engine; her usual objections to backtracking are made worse by everything they woke up on their flight through the city. It hasn’t snowed for more than a week, and whatever woke up may not be going back to sleep any time soon. If they can move the boat, it will give them more options.

Tuuri reluctantly agrees to stop tinkering and come inside when the sun goes down, but when everyone else is getting ready for bed, she’s still sitting in the office with her books and her diagrams.

“Tuuri, go to sleep,” Mikkel says.

“Sorry,” says Tuuri, not moving. “I know I shouldn’t be wasting candles like this.”

Emil kind of envies her. At least she has something to do.

By the second morning, Lalli still hasn’t woken up.

#

Tuuri has roped Reyinr and Mikkel into helping her with the engine. Sigrun is disassembling and cleaning the spare rifle in hopes that it won’t turn out to be a piece of complete junk. And Emil is keeping an eye on Lalli.

Now that he knows that brushing the hair out of Lalli’s face won’t wake him--he’s tried shaking him and shouting, and none of that worked either--he doesn’t actually want to. Lalli's slept for a long time before, but never much more than a day, and Emil can't stop thinking about the way he looked when he collapsed, that glowing cat guttering and fading out. He’d thought that nothing could scare him more than when Sigrun fell to the giant, but this is worse. Then his mind had gone blank with terror, and now it has far too much time to work, around and around in the same hopeless circles.

When Lalli opens his eyes, relief knocks the breath out of Emil, but it doesn’t last. Lalli doesn’t look at him, doesn’t seem to hear anything he says, and the slack blankness of his face is made even more disturbing with a pair of open eyes looking out of it.

Emil goes to get Mikkel, but after a brief examination, Mikkel only shrugs. “There’s nothing physically wrong,” he says. “You might try getting some food and water into him.”

It’s like Mikkel doesn’t care, except that when he comes back with a bowl of porridge, it’s got an entire apple chopped into it, one of their last. Lalli’s head comes up for just a second, in the familiar way he has of paying extra attention, but the second and the flicker of awareness pass.

Emil holds the bowl out to Lalli. “You eat it,” he says. He’s speaking Finnish, but he might as well be speaking Icelandic. In the end, he manages to get the entire bowl of porridge into Lalli, one spoonful at a time, and he kind of wishes there was a sea troll attacking the boat, because he would really like to stab something now.

Tuuri comes into the sleeping compartment a little later, sits down on Emil’s bunk, and asks, “How’s he doing?”

“Look for yourself,” says Emil. “He’s been like this all day. What if he’s like this forever?”

“He won’t be. Not for long,” says Tuuri wearily.

It makes Emil furious, because she always does this, dismisses his concerns like he’s stupid, insists that Lalli is fine when he’s really not fine.

Before Emil can say any of this, Tuuri goes on, “If he doesn’t get better soon, he’ll die.”

“What?”

“Most people, right, they keep all their souls inside all the time. But a mage can send out their animal soul, their Luonto. They can do amazing things. But sometimes, when they send it out, it doesn’t come back. And nobody can live for long without their soul.”

A part of Emil still desperately wants to believe that she’s repeating a scary story she heard around a campfire once on some remote Finnish island. But she’s not: she knows. “Have you seen that happen to someone?”

Tuuri presses her lips together. She nods, and her eyes well up. Panic flutters in Emil’s chest--dying Lalli and crying Tuuri is more than he can deal with.

“But what do we do?” he says.

“There’s nothing anyone can do.” Tuuri speaks between gulps of air; her voice is thick and harsh and her eyes spill over. “Onni told us, over and over, but especially Lalli--because he’s a mage, and she was his teacher--because he just shrugs and says okay and you never know what’s getting through to him and he thinks he can do _anything_ \--but there’s nothing anyone can do. There’s nothing.”

Emil doesn’t know what to say, so he just sits down next to Tuuri while tears roll down her face and her shoulders shake, and Lalli stares unseeing in their general direction. Finally she takes a deep breath, rubs her eyes, and says, “I have to get back to work. I’m glad you’re looking after him, Emil.”

#

Emil doesn’t know what’s woken him up. Sigrun’s snores have had a different tenor since her injury, but they’re still recognizably hers. Reynir is muttering something. At some point during the night, Tuuri must finally have come to bed and tucked herself in behind Reynir--they’ve started sharing her bunk, since Lalli is using his mattress all the time. There’s nothing but the familiar, comforting sounds of the crew in the tank at night. And Lalli--

Emil tries to tell himself he’s imagining it. Lalli is lying on his mattress the way he has been for the past few days. But he looks--like himself, somehow, the way one of his arms is dangling off the edge and trailing onto the floor, the way a lock of hair has fallen across his nose, fluttering with every breath. Emil tries not to, because it won’t help, and because touching Lalli when he’s not there is weird, but in the end he reaches over and pushes the lock of hair out of Lalli’s face. Lalli shifts, snuffles, blinks, and looks at Emil.

“Hey, Lalli,” Emil whispers.

Lalli reaches up like he’s going to irritably push Emil’s hand out of his hair, but when he gets there he grabs Emil’s hand instead and holds tight.

“Second time you never do, okay?” says Emil.

Lalli makes a small disgusted noise. “You sound like Onni,” he says.

Emil is smiling so hard his face hurts, and his hand is still joined with Lalli’s in the space between their beds. He should probably wake the others. They’ve all been worried, and Tuuri will want to know that Lalli’s soul is back, whatever that means. But Emil doesn’t want this to end, this moment, just the two of them.

And in a minute Reynir wakes up anyway, his vague muttering turning into a startled exclamation. He sits up and leans over to look at Lalli, and then shakes Tuuri awake, jabbering excitedly. Tuuri turns, wide-eyed, and launches herself out of bed and onto Lalli's mattress. Lalli doesn’t return her hug exactly, but after his first flinch he sort of relaxes into it. The commotion, of course, wakes up Sigrun and Mikkel. Sigrun rubs her knuckles into Lalli’s scalp and says he’s the craziest little bugger she’s ever worked with, and Mikkel says that as long as everyone’s up he might as well make breakfast.

This announcement is met with a collective groan, but Emil’s heart isn’t really in it, and he’s not sure anyone else’s is either.

#

That afternoon, there’s a scream from the deck. It sounds like Tuuri. Emil and Lalli are both at the door of the tank at the same time, and Sigrun is a heartbeat behind but overtakes them easily. So Emil is the last one to come out onto the deck expecting a sea troll and finding Tuuri with an elated smile across her grease-stained face, both fists raised in the air. “It works! Thank all the little gods, it works!” she says, and lets out another blood-curdling whoop.

She scrambles to her feet, pulls Reynir to his, and whirls him around the deck a few times, both of them laughing with abandon. Then she grabs Mikkel’s hands, bouncing on her tiptoes. “I got us a boat! I got us a boat! Now we can go to Odense and try to find that hospital!”

“Well, that’s up to our captain,” says Mikkel with a small smile. “I seem to recall that she once said something about there being zero reason to back down from a challenge, and that even babies know that.”

“ _Yeah_ I did,” says Sigrun. A grin splits her face, for the first time since the giant tore out her throat, and she gives a hoarse yell of her own. She grabs Tuuri and Mikkel in a double squeeze, Tuuri under one arm and the other around Mikkel. “We are back in business! I have the most best, bravest crew of vikings in the entire world!”

Emil’s heart lifts, because no matter how badly they’ve screwed up, Sigrun still believes in them. But Lalli isn’t anywhere around. He probably cleared out once the hollering and dancing started. Emil finds him on top of the tall middle part of the boat, with all the antennas and wires and stuff.

“We go to Odense,” Emil says.

Lalli shrugs, like he never expected anything different, or else it’s just that wherever they go is pretty much the same to Lalli.

In the afternoon sunlight, Lalli’s hair looks silver, and the way he tilts his head reminds Emil of the glowing cat that apparently was part of Lalli’s soul. He can’t help but remember the panic he felt when Lalli was gone, and how much would be missing from a world without Lalli in it. The taste of rosehips, the bite of teeth at his lip, the shape of Finnish words in his mouth. The feel of fingers stroking through his hair, and gripping his own tight.

Lalli hasn’t said no. Emil hasn’t asked, not properly. And he’s not a loser, Sigrun just said so, right? He can do this.

“Lalli,” says Emil, and the world seems to thrum beneath his feet. Or no, that’s just the boat’s engine starting up. “I think ... I don't know if you know time we see food, and your mouth, uh, over my mouth, and I second time if you ...”

Emil’s fumbling speech is interrupted when the boat chooses that moment to lurch into motion, and he has to grab onto the nearest antenna to keep from falling down. When he gets his balance back enough to try again, Lalli is looking pale and not at all well, and Emil’s screwed it up again, and ... Lalli loses his breakfast, and Emil scrambles backwards quickly to keep his boots clean.

“Oh, gross, I forgot you used to do that,” says Emil in Swedish. “Boats too, huh?” Then he switches back to Finnish. “Leave it, nobody not see anyway here, right? Come, we go down.”

Lalli gives him a shaky and distinctly green death glare, but he accepts a hand from Emil anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No actual Finnish in this chapter! But I am quite impressed with with what Lei's done with Emil's "Finnish"; I've got to give her at least 90% of the credit this time.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, as always, Kiraly and Lei are true heroes.
> 
> As I was writing this, events in canon overtook this story even more; it turns out that it was a lot easier for the crew to cross the Great Belt than in my version, and a lot harder for Emil to achieve any level of competence in Finnish. Oh well! If I wasn't willing to have my stories thoroughly jossed before I even finish writing them, I'd never get anything done.
> 
> Also, I feel like I should add a warning for someone getting trapped in a pile of smoking rubble. Guess who!

“There’s nothing here,” says Lalli. He sounds annoyed.

The trouble is, they--the entire crew--are more than a little lost. As long as they stuck to the old highways, they always knew more or less where they were; by the time they left the area covered by their original maps, Emil had found an atlas on one of their looting expeditions, and they were in frequent contact with the base at Mora. But that’s been less true the further they traveled, and since the crossing Tuuri hasn’t been able to get anything from the radio but static.

The crossing itself only took a few hours. Tuuri did her best to navigate, and Reynir was surprisingly helpful--he did work on a ship for a while, even if it was mostly washing dishes--and she’s almost certain she set them down on the right island, anyway. Anything beyond that is a guess.

That’s not what’s bothering Lalli, though. Lalli’s job is to scout out their immediate surroundings, to find them safe routes to travel and places to camp, to warn them of signs of trolls or beasts when they’re out in the field. Figuring out where they are in relation to the rest of the world is not his job, and Lalli never seems to worry about things that aren’t his job. Not even about the fact that the nights are getting shorter and the days longer, and no one is coming to get them in the spring if no one knows where they are.

Maybe it’s only Emil who’s worried about that. No one has said anything out loud. But everyone is on edge.

What bothers Lalli is being given a job that he can’t see the sense in. And he’s right--back home, this place would be a good-sized town, but by the standards of the Silent World it’s nothing. Not only that, but barely any of it is standing. It seems to have been deliberately destroyed when whoever lived here abandoned it, almost like a team of Cleansers has been through. There’s nothing to find here, certainly nothing that would justify the hour that Sigrun has budgeted to exploring it.

It’s just that these are the first buildings they’ve seen at all since they landed. The road along the coast that they’ve been following turns inland here, and it would be good to be able to match it up to something in the atlas, however unlikely it seems that a place as insignificant as this would even have been recorded.

There’s also the possibility that Sigrun is going crazy from too much driving and not enough action. This trip’s been a failure on that front too. Whoever destroyed it may have done a sloppy job by professional standards, but it was effective enough. Emil and Lalli have gone over every square meter of their assigned half of the town, and there’s no more sign of trolls than there is of anything worth taking, or any clue to what this place was once called.

“We have--” Emil gets his watch out and tries to convert the numbers on it into Finnish. Of everything Tuuri’s tried to teach him, numbers are the worst; anything above four gets hopelessly jumbled up in his head. Finally he gives up, nudges Lalli with an elbow to make sure he’s looking, and mimes it instead, flashing all ten of his fingers once, and then a second time. “We stay here, and see Sigrun soon? Is it safe?”

Lalli hisses between his teeth: stupid question. Well, maybe. Emil just wants to be sure.

The old playground is overgrown with trees and climbing vines, but the equipment is still standing: a carousel, a swing set, a climbing platform with slides. It’s such a strange, familiar, homelike thing to have come across here, far beyond the borders of the world. Once they finished their search, Lalli quickly claimed the climbing platform for his spot, and Emil scrambled up after him. It’s the highest spot around, the best place for seeing anything that might be sneaking up on them, but Emil’s not sure that’s the only reason Lalli chose it. He looks comfortable, leaning against the railing, swinging his legs out over empty space.

Twenty minutes. Enough time for plenty of fun things. They’re not on a moving boat, and this is as much privacy as they’re ever likely to get.

“We can--” Emil starts. “If you want--” he tries again. He’s going to sound stupid. There’s no other way for him to sound in Finnish. That’s not a good enough reason for him not to say it. “I want you. You want me?”

Lalli tilts his head. “Want?”

“Like …” Okay, Emil tried words. Slowly, so Lalli has a chance to say no, or to slide away, or to punch Emil in the face, or whatever, Emil leans forward and kisses him.

Lalli doesn’t do any of those things. He does draw back a bit when their mouths meet, but before Emil can break off entirely, Lalli has his hands on Emil’s shoulders, pulling him back in, swinging his own legs around to face Emil.

Lalli’s mouth is warm, softer than it looks--softer than any part of Lalli looks. Softer than Emil remembers. Lalli’s not biting this time. Their legs are in an awkward tangle, Emil half-straddling Lalli’s thigh, rubbing up against him. Just a few seconds of kissing, and Emil is embarrassingly hard, but then Lalli shifts his position a bit and he’s hard too, so that’s okay, probably.

Emil is panting when Lalli takes his mouth away--not far, close enough that Emil can feel his breath as he says, “Yes. I want.”

He buries his face in Emil’s hair while his hands are busy undoing the zipper on Emil’s jacket, sliding up under his shirt. It’s warm where their bodies are pressed together, shockingly cold where the outside air touches Emil’s belly, and everywhere it’s so--so _much._

“Lalli, please--” he breathes.

Lalli disentangles himself from Emil, sits back on his heels--now it’s cold everywhere, not fair--and lays a hand against Emil’s mouth.

Quiet. Right. Emil nods frantically; he can do that, if Lalli will only touch him some more.

He doesn’t, not right away. Emil has seen Lalli get undressed often enough--he’s even undressed him himself once or twice--and he can’t say it’s never affected him, but it’s never made his mouth go dry quite the way it does now, as Lalli deliberately strips off his gloves.

Then Lalli’s legs are bracketing Emil’s, and the hands are back, palms and fingertips and nails, sending shivers through him everywhere they touch.

When she was teaching him body parts, Tuuri never liked to use the Swedish words, but demonstrated on her own body, and had Emil mirror her. He would remember better that way, she explained, if there was nothing mediating between the thing he was naming and the Finnish word for it.

She’s right. His skin remembers. As Lalli traces down his body, the words bubble up without quite breaking the surface of his lips: _Rinta, kylkiluut, maha, lantio._

The last one brings Lalli’s fingers beneath the waistband of Emil’s pants, and he tugs at it impatiently. Emil undoes his pants with clumsy urgency, manages to wriggle them down his thighs without dislodging Lalli. If the outside air is cold, the surface of the climbing platform is freezing. But that doesn’t matter, because Lalli’s got Emil’s cock in his hands now, stroking him off--hands, it’s just hands, how can they possibly feel so much better than Emil’s own hands?

He should--Emil should--but he can only keep one coherent thought in his mind now, and it’s quiet, quiet, as his climax bursts from him and leaves him shuddering and breathless.

Emil’s a bit of a mess. He should have--oh, well. As soon as he can move he’s going to have to find his handkerchief and clean himself off. Before he can, Lalli drags his fingers through the mess on Emil’s shirt and brings them to his mouth, licking Emil’s come off with a look of intense concentration like he’s trying to decide whether he likes the taste. That’s--Emil is wrung-out, completely finished, but watching Lalli, his belly shivers and his cock gives a fresh twitch. That’s really weird, and a little gross, and so hot.

Is Emil allowed to talk yet? He would really like to return the favor, but he doesn’t know if he should ask. He settles for sitting up a little straighter, tugging at the zipper on Lalli’s jacket, and giving him his most hopeful look.

Lalli’s eyebrows fly up, and a muscle in his cheek jumps--it’s possible that he’s laughing at Emil’s most hopeful look, just a little. Emil doesn’t really mind, especially since the next thing Lalli does is lower his hands to the platform and lean back on them, like he’s telling Emil: go ahead, do whatever you want.

So Emil takes off his own gloves. Then he opens Lalli’s jacket and lowers his pants, nothing he hasn’t done before, though it’s a little odd to be looking at his cock rather than politely away. It’s--well, it’s nice, flushed and ready, surrounded by soft, ashy curls. Emil licks his lips nervously. He’s only ever heard about this, he’s never had an opportunity to try it, but he wants to, and Lalli’s letting him do whatever he wants, so--

He shifts his weight around, supporting himself on one elbow, and licks along the head of Lalli’s cock, tracing the edge of his foreskin with his tongue. Lalli’s hands and stomach muscles clench, and Emil hears his soft, sharp intake of breath. Good? Not good? But Lalli doesn't slide away, or tell him to stop, or any of that.

It doesn’t taste of much--a little bitter, a little salt. It’s the smell that’s overwhelming, the way Lalli always smells, but stronger, and with an added sharp note like a cat’s musk. Emil wets his lips again, slides them down Lalli’s cock, but he doesn’t even get halfway before he has to stop. Lalli isn’t especially big--how does anyone ever get the whole thing into their mouth without choking? There must be some trick to it. He pulls up, but before he can try again, Lalli twists a hand in his hair and lifts his head back.

With his other hand, he takes one of Emil’s, twines their fingers together, brings it to his cock. Both hands moving together, Lalli showing Emil how he likes it, a little slower than Emil would do it, not at all gentle.

He keeps his right hand in Emil’s hair, keeps Emil’s face tilted up towards his, watching him with that unblinking stare. Despite his less-than-successful attempt at giving a blow job, Emil doesn’t feel like he’s come up short now. It doesn’t even feel like Lalli’s judging him, really. More like Lalli is … savoring him.

Lalli doesn’t last long once he gets his rhythm--he probably hasn’t done this before either, not with someone else. His hand tightens in Emil’s hair and his hips jerk, and the soft, short sound he makes when he spills over their hands makes Emil’s breath catch and stutter.

Emil finds his handkerchief, crumpled but serviceable, in one of his jacket pockets, and makes a cursory attempt at cleaning up. They’ve both come back covered in troll goop often enough, this can’t be much worse, can it? Except when it’s Mikkel doing your laundry. But Emil can’t really muster the energy to worry about that right now. He does put his gloves back on, pull up his pants, and fasten his jacket, because it’s cold. Lalli is lying sprawled bonelessly across the platform, and when Emil leans back against the railing, Lalli curls towards him and rubs his head against Emil’s thigh.

“Good,” he says, and as soon as he gets the word out, he’s fallen asleep.

Very, very carefully--because he would almost rather be late for meeting Sigrun and make her think that they’ve both been eaten by a troll than disturb Lalli right now--Emil takes out his watch. They’ve still got a few minutes. He can let Lalli sleep. It’s okay.

#

Emil has gotten used to being attacked by trolls when he’s out looking for books, or more recently, food. He and the others are after treasure, there are monsters guarding it, that’s--it’s fair. In a way. But now all he’s looking for is a sign that says “Welcome to Stubberup.”

Or Hersnap, or Martofte, which Tuuri figures are the three most likely places that the next town might be. But it could be any one of a dozen others, or somewhere else entirely.

He wouldn’t even have to be here if Lalli could read in the dark, or if he were willing to shine lights around at nighttime. (Although Emil has to admit that it’s probably a good thing that Lalli _isn’t._ ) Or Lalli could have gone by himself when it was light out, if he and Tuuri hadn’t had an argument about Lalli’s refusal to carry anything with him into the field other than his usual gear--like maps or writing materials--versus Tuuri’s doubts about his ability to remember and accurately report unfamiliar Danish writing. Emil hadn’t 100% followed what they were saying, but he didn’t need any Finnish at all to tell that it had gotten nasty.

Or Sigrun and Emil could have gone without him--they’ve done that too, often enough, and it should have been a short, simple reconnaissance mission--if Reynir hadn’t inadvertently made things worse by mentioning a dream he’d had for three nights running, full of falling stones and hungry teeth and fire. Lalli doesn’t like it any better than Emil does, but they both know by now that it’s a good idea to listen to Reynir when he gets like that.

So between Reynir’s warnings and Tuuri’s aspersions on his competence, there just wasn’t any way that Lalli was going to be left behind this morning, even though Emil wasn’t sure how much use he’d be after barely an hour of sleep.

And naturally, Reynir’s visions have proven to be both depressingly accurate and not actually helpful. It’s really not fair for there to be this many trolls, with this many teeth, when they only want _directions_.

Whatever this place is, it’s not all pavement and buildings like Copenhagen or Kalundborg. It’s like the suburbs, except that the houses are more sturdily built. Enough of them to make nice cozy nesting sites, enough trees to make line-of sight useless and sticking to the sunlight impossible.

Sigrun pulls her knife out of a body, stomps on it for good measure when it falls, and sucks in a deep breath. The area’s clear, for now. “Find us a way back to the tank,” she says over her shoulder. “Home, you understand?”

Emil opens his mouth to translate, but Lalli shakes himself out of his daze and nods. He probably does understand. _Tank_ is a word he hears a lot, and _home_ is pretty basic, and even if he doesn’t know either one it’s not too hard to figure out what Sigrun wants at this point.

The roads aren’t much more than tracks of overgrown rubble. Emil can barely make them out, but Lalli moves along them as easily as if they were highways. Emil follows him, and Sigrun brings up the rear, keeping an eye out for trouble.

It doesn’t take long to find them. Lalli skids to a stop in front of a long, low wooden building, looking up at one of the windows with the sudden alertness that Sigrun can recognize as well as Emil can, by this point. She has enough time to pivot and bring up her knife before something launches itself out the window at her face. She bisects it before it lands, but both halves keep moving, one dragging itself along the ground, the other trying to claw its way up her shoulder. Her knife and boots are a blur of motion. There’s not much Emil can do to help without maybe accidentally stabbing Sigrun--not that she looks like she needs help--and Lalli’s attention is still fixed on the window the troll came from. A grenade through the window should at least discourage anything else from following the first troll, so Emil primes one and tosses it and gets out of the way quickly. Lalli is moving back too, with more than his usual grace, practically gliding, never taking his eyes off the window. The pit of Emil’s stomach goes cold, because Lalli looks just like he did when he summoned that cat-spirit-thing, and he can’t--before Emil can think too hard about what he’s about to do, he grabs Lalli by the shoulder and turns him around and says, “Don’t--”

Lalli’s eyes are an unearthly, glowing blue. Emil just has time to think that maybe he made a bad mistake when the explosion hits, more powerful than anything than Emil should be able to achieve with his own equipment. His head hurts, all of a sudden, and the world goes dark.

#

It’s hot and dark and smoky, and the walls are pressing in on him, and for a confused minute Emil thinks he’s dead. Then he remembers what happened and he realizes: not dead, just dying. Like Lucas back in the Cleansers, who was still breathing, barely, when they dug him out of that collapsed building, but who never opened his eyes again.

Somebody’s coming for him. Somebody must be, unless Lalli and Sigrun are--

That’s when Emil throws up, heaving uncontrollably between coughs, so that his chest aches with it. He can’t even see where his sick is getting, because he can’t see anything, and he doesn’t know whether the tears streaming down his face are from the smoke or the terror or what. Once he’s dead, none of it will matter to him, but it matters now. What are Tuuri and Reynir and Mikkel going to do without the rest of them, lost and helpless? Probably Emil’s parents will never find out what happened, just that he went into the Silent World and disappeared without a trace--

 _Stay low. Breathe shallowly, and cover your nose and mouth with something if you can. Look for exits, but check their temperature and stability before you try to use them …_ the familiar words quiet some of Emil’s panic, more comforting than one of Reynir’s scrawled protection runes. He heard them so often in Cleanser training that he doesn’t have to think about them, which is good, because the thinking thing isn’t working so well now. His head is swimming, but--okay. Staying low isn’t a problem; there’s not enough room for him to stand if he tried. At least none of his limbs are trapped. He can’t reach his handkerchief, but he can sort of pull the neck of his undershirt up over his face, and over there, the rubble seems loose, and he can even see a little light …

He wriggles closer. The light’s getting brighter. Somebody is clearing the rubble from the other side. He should make a noise to let them know he’s here, but all he can manage is a croak. Maybe it’s good enough? There’s a hand, reaching--Lalli?

The gap in the rubble widens. It’s Sigrun, her hair streaked with soot, _beautiful_ , a triumphant grin lighting up her face from behind her breath mask--

She’s wearing a breath mask? How odd. Is Emil dreaming? But no, of course--fire safety.

When Sigrun finally pulls him free, Emil gulps in a lungful of fresh air, tries to say, “Lalli?” and ends up doubled over coughing.

“Easy there, pal. Little grumpy’s fine, better’n you at the moment,” she says. She whacks him on the back, maybe out of some notion that this is helpful in all coughing situations, and pulls him to his feet. “C’mon, walk, that’s a good warrior.”

A little further on, they find Mikkel, moving larger pieces of rubble out of the way. Sigrun gives him a big grin and a wave, and Mikkel’s face relaxes fractionally--maybe--in relief. But where’s Lalli?

“Lalli?” Emil tries again. It comes out clearer this time.

“He’s _fine,_ ” says Sigrun. “One-track mind, huh? He had to run back to camp for muscles here, and once he was there the best thing he could do was stay. That’s where we’re headed too, if you can just calm down for a minute and let our medic do his thing.”

So Emil has to sit down and let Mikkel look into his eyes, and inside his mouth, and all over his scalp. And then he has to answer questions like, what’s his name, and where is he, and what’s the last thing he remembers. He does wonder whether this is all strictly ordinary medic stuff, or whether Mikkel is having him on somehow. Mikkel remarks that paranoia is potentially a very serious symptom. Emil doesn’t say another word he doesn’t have to for the rest of the examination.

Finally Mikkel says, “Assuming you don’t keel over dead within the next couple of hours, you’ll probably be fine.”

“Thanks,” says Emil. “That’s encouraging.”

“That’s the spirit!” says Sigrun, who is immune to sarcasm. “Let’s go home.” She turns towards Mikkel, who’s about done packing up his stuff, just in time to catch him unobtrusively slipping something he’s picked up from the wreckage--a long, thin rectangular something--into his medical kit. “Honestly, you’re like a kid, I can’t take you anywhere. What is that?”

“Nothing that would interest you, I’m sure,” says Mikkel.

“Do we have to have the mutiny talk again? I hate having the same talk twice, it’s so boring.”

“Oh, well, if you’re making it an order.” Mikkel takes the rectangle out of his kit and holds it up. It’s a street sign, and it says: _Dalby Bygade._ “I’ll have to consult with our driver to be certain, of course, but I believe I may have discovered where we are.”

#

By the time they make it back to the tank, daylight is fading quickly. Tuuri and Reynir are fussing with the fire and something that smells vaguely like food, and Lalli is standing a little distance off, and he’s fine. He really is, uniform a bit singed but nothing worse, and he’s looking Emil over like he’s taking all of him in, like that time a few days ago at that ancient playground. For a moment, everything is perfect.

Then Lalli scowls and retreats into the tank. Tuuri looks up, gives one of her inhuman shrieks, rushes forward, and is brought up short by a stick that Mikkel has grabbed from the woodpile and held out at her chest level.

“Nearly two months in the field,” says Mikkel, “and none of you has the slightest grasp of sterile procedure.”

“I wasn’t going to hug him!” Tuuri protests, but Emil knows Tuuri well enough by now to recognize when she’s lying through her teeth, and Mikkel probably does too. “I just wanted to see--”

“Slight concussion. Smoke inhalation. He’ll be fine.” Then Mikkel switches to Icelandic, to include Reynir in what he’s saying. Emil’s Icelandic is still the next thing to non-existent--Finnish is bad enough--but he can understand the word for quarantine, anyway. Tuuri and Reynir obediently put their masks on and lock themselves in the cab.

Emil, Sigrun and Mikkel get on with their decontamination, to the sound of Sigrun’s chatter about what an awesome troll fight it was, and how Emil totally blew that nest sky-high, and how Mikkel’s weird habit of reading every gods-damned thing actually came in handy for once, how about that? Emil keeps hoping that Lalli will come out of the tank and give him a hand. But when they’ve finished, and Tuuri and Reynir come out as flushed and happy as they always do from quarantine, Lalli is still inside. At least now Emil can talk to him in private and find out what’s eating him.

Lalli is in one of the top bunks, and he glares balefully down at Emil when he comes into the sleeping compartment. “What were you thinking? Would I interrupt you when you’ve got a lit grenade in your hand?”

Lalli wouldn’t. Lalli has sense, and Emil did something dumb--when Lalli puts it that way, Emil can see just how incredibly dumb. But he also got trapped underneath a pile of smoking rubble, and he’s exhausted, and he doesn’t feel like being lectured right now. _Sigrun_ didn’t lecture him (although that may just be because she doesn’t realize what Emil did.) Why can’t Lalli just be happy to see him?

“I was--” Emil starts to say, but he doesn’t have the word for terrified in Finnish. “I want not you injured.”

Lalli’s answer is a spate of words, of which Emil catches maybe one in five, and those are going by too fast for Emil to string them together into any kind of sense. He can only hear Lalli’s anger, like a physical force, pushing him backwards, cutting him off at the knees, so that he sits down hard on his bunk.

Emil has been vaguely aware that he can’t understand Lalli as well when he talks to Tuuri as when he talks to Emil himself. But after all (he told himself) it’s not polite to listen to other people’s conversations, and anyway (he told himself) they probably weren’t talking about anything interesting anyway. It’s not like he _couldn't_ have followed if he’d tried.

The truth is, Lalli has been slowing down for Emil, limiting his vocabulary to words that Emil is likely to know, and Emil has never realized until now, because he isn’t anymore.

 _I’m injured_ was the second Finnish phrase Tuuri taught Emil, but there was another one she taught him first, the most useful thing--according to Tuuri--that you can know how to say in any language.

“I don’t understand,” says Emil.

“Did. I. Ask. You,” says Lalli, slowly and distinctly, biting off each word like it tastes bad. “I never asked you. I never asked you to protect me. I never asked you--” he makes a sharp gesture with his hand in the space between himself and Emil; everything that’s happened between them since the mission started-- “for anything.”

“But. But you--” this is ridiculous, Emil still doesn’t know how to say kiss. “You put your mouth over mine first!”

Lalli shrugs. “Tuuri told me that _olet rakastunut minuun._ ” Another jumble of words Emil doesn’t recognize. What did Tuuri say about him? “I wanted to see if it was true.”

Emil feels a brief stab of annoyance at Tuuri for interfering in things that were _none of her business_ , but that’s all the fury he can spare from Lalli. “You can’t do that! You can’t--put your mouth over people if you don’t mean it!”

“Then I won’t do it a second time,” says Lalli, with a curl to his lip and a bit of sing-song to his words, like--it’s not _fair_ for him to make fun of Emil’s Finnish, when he was only learning it for Lalli in the first place. But Lalli never asked him for that either, did he? “It’s just mouths. How can you mean it or not mean it? The whole thing is _tyhmä._ ”

“Well,” says Emil tightly. His throat hurts, and it’s hard to get words out. It’s probably from the smoke before, he just hasn’t noticed until now. “Fine. Don’t.”

“Good,” says Lalli. He drops down from the bunk, and rolls under Tuuri’s, his back to Emil. “Now get out.”

Emil does. What else is he going to do?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finnish words and phrases in this chapter!
> 
> Rinta = chest  
> Kylkiluut = ribs  
> Maha = belly  
> Lantio = hip  
> Olet rakastunut minuun = you were in love with me  
> Tyhmä = stupid


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I already linked to [Kiraly's wonderful illustration of the rosehips scene](http://worldsentwined.tumblr.com/post/145061457629/happy-birthday) in the notes on chapter one, but in case you've been reading the new chapters as they come and haven't seen it, you should!
> 
> As always, I am very grateful to Kiraly and Lei (even if I got a little impatient and ended up posting this chapter before I got answers to my second round of Finnish-related questions. Any remaining errors are mine and feel free to point them out if you notice them.)

Emil makes it as far as the office. Then he has a problem. The rest of the crew is outside, talking, eating dinner, and Emil can’t go out there and act like nothing happened. Or, worse, _tell_ them what happened. But the longer he stays here, the more they’re going to think--something that really isn’t true.

Well, it’s not like he doesn’t have a perfectly plausible excuse for feeling awful already. On top of that, no one’s likely to notice that there’s anything else wrong. Right?

He stands in the open doorway of the tank. Mikkel and Sigrun are arguing about something, and Reyinr has gone back to fussing with the food. The cat has her paws on his knee, poking her nose into a bowl, and Tuuri is hanging over his shoulder, which she’s the right height to do when he’s sitting and she’s standing.

Emil once punched a giant in the face. He can join the crew for dinner.

Tuuri looks up, says something to Reynir, and comes over in Emil’s direction. He’s torn between relief and the urge to flee, but there’s nowhere to retreat to, anyway.

“So, um,” says Tuuri, her hands shoved into her pockets, flicking a glance over Emil’s shoulder into the tank.

“I--” Emil swallows hard. “I need to know how to say _I’m sorry_ in Finnish.”

Tuuri hugs him. Her hair tickles his nose. “Anteeksi,” she says.

There’s a second when Emil can’t quite remember how his body works, and then he puts his arms around her, too. She’s soft and solid, so different from Lalli. It’s hard to believe they’re cousins. He tries to repeat what she’s just said, like it’s an ordinary Finnish lesson, but what comes out of his mouth is a sob, and then he can’t stop.

“Hey, hey,” says Tuuri. She sounds a little freaked out. “Hey, it’s okay. Here, come on, sit down. It’s going to be okay.”

They end up sitting side-by-side on the steps of the tank. Tuuri keeps one arm around Emil until he finally gets himself under control. It’s humiliating--he didn’t cry when Lalli was yelling at him. He didn’t cry when Lalli was dying. Why is he crying now?

He rubs a hand across his face. “I’m surprised you’re not happier about this. You did tell me so.”

“Yeah, I did,” says Tuuri. “You should have been paying more attention to what I said next. You know, about how you’re my friend and I didn’t want to see you get hurt? Well, you’re still my friend and now you’ve gotten hurt, so no, I’m not happy.” She’s quiet for a minute, looking out to where the rest of the crew is sitting. “How could I blame you for loving Lalli? I love Lalli too. But he’s not always an easy person to love.”

Emil shakes his head, because it feels like Tuuri has gotten hold of things from the wrong end somehow. It’s not like he ever tried particularly hard to love Lalli. The difficulty would be in not loving him. Even now, when Lalli has made it clear that he wants nothing to do with Emil, he doesn’t know how he’s going to stop.

“I just--” Emil knows he’s going to sound pathetic, but he’s already started talking and the words fall out anyway. “I thought he liked me.”

Tuuri looks at him like he’s just said something really stupid. Well, maybe he has, but she doesn’t have to look at him like that.

“Um, Emil. I don’t know what you guys have or haven’t done and I don’t need to, but--I’ve seen Lalli come and sit next to you when we’re eating, and hold still while you fussed with his hair during decontamination. I’ve heard him voluntarily start conversations with you. He wouldn’t do that if he didn’t like you.”

“Maybe.” It should make Emil feel better that Tuuri doesn’t think he’s been completely fooling himself this whole time, but it mostly reminds him that Lalli isn’t going to want to do any of that anymore, and he feels like maybe he’ll start crying again.

He doesn’t, though, and after a little while Tuuri says, “C’mon, let’s go get something to eat. Reynir’s been experimenting with reconstituted potato. He made it into some kind of pancakes, and also put turnips in them? They’re barely burnt at all.”

“I’m sorry,” Emil laughs. It’s a weak, shaky laugh, but it’s there. “Was that supposed to make me hungry? Because it really didn’t.”

“Don't be a wimp,” says Tuuri, who has clearly been spending too much time with Sigrun. She nudges Emil with her shoulder. “Why did you sign on to a mission to the Silent World, if not for adventure?”

#

If Emil could think of some excuse not to go to bed when everyone else does, he wouldn’t. But he can’t, so he does, and lies awake while they drop off to sleep one by one. Sigrun starts snoring, and Reynir starts muttering, and Lalli is still curled tightly under Tuuri’s bunk, and he doesn’t want Emil there.

And who cares, really. It’s not Lalli’s tank; Emil has as much right to be there as anyone. He may have only gotten his place on this expedition because Siv and Torbjörn are his aunt and uncle, but he’s earned it by now. He has.

And still, the memory of Lalli’s last words to him sits like an itch between his shoulder blades, where he can’t reach it, and as tired as he is, it’s a long time before he falls asleep.

Lalli doesn’t wake up the next morning, but that’s not much of a surprise. Lalli’s not usually up in the morning anyway. Tuuri, Sigrun, and Mikkel are planning their new route--the street sign Mikkel found has cheered Tuuri up immensely, and she’s practically vibrating with excitement. Emil and Reynir have gotten stuck with the camp chores by default. Sigrun has deputized Emil to make sure Reynir doesn’t try anything else creative with turnips, and that’s about the level of responsibility he feels up to today.

That, and occasionally checking up on Lalli. He does it on his way to get something from the storeroom or to relay a message to Sigrun, just making sure that Lalli is still there, and breathing, and not in any obvious distress--not that Emil is sure what he could do if Lalli were. What he is sure of is that Lalli won’t be happy if he wakes up and catches Emil watching him, so he doesn’t stay long. But he keeps coming back. He can’t help it.

Thankfully, it’s not on one of these occasions that Lalli wakes up. In fact, despite Emil’s obsessive checking-up, he manages to get out of bed, put on his uniform, and get some dubious breakfast (or whatever you call it when you wake up in the late afternoon) from Reynir, all without Emil noticing.

Emil is washing the dishes when Lalli comes over with his bowl and spoon, and Lalli draws back a little--he was probably expecting Mikkel. Before he can lose his nerve, Emil blurts out the syllables he’s been rolling around in his head all day, muttering them under his breath like they were a spell: “I’m sorry.”

They work about as well as any spell would for Emil. “Don’t,” says Lalli, and he turns his back and goes into the tank.

A little later, when Emil is putting away the clean laundry, he can hear Lalli and Tuuri talking. Tuuri is apologizing--Emil can understand that well enough now--probably for yelling at Lalli the other day. And Lalli isn’t storming out. It hurts that he’ll accept Tuuri’s apology and not Emil’s, but it makes sense. She’s his cousin, practically the only family he has, and Emil is just … Emil. There’s a little bit of talk about the route Tuuri wants him to scout out, and alternate paths in case the one they’ve planned isn’t passable, and then the conversation moves to other subjects, and Emil can’t follow and doesn’t try.

Probably Lalli is telling Tuuri what a jerk Emil is, and then she won’t want to be his friend anymore. And Reynir will take Tuuri’s side, whatever it is, and Mikkel already doesn’t think much of Emil. If Emil and Lalli have reached the dividing-up-their-friends phase of their breakup, Emil is going to be left with … Sigrun.

Well. That’s not so bad. Sigrun (as Sigrun herself would be the first to admit) is worth a dozen friends who aren’t Sigrun. More importantly, she’s Emil’s boss. As long as he gets along with Sigrun, he’ll be okay. He just has to keep his head down and work. Like Lalli.

When Lalli leaves that night to scout, Emil doesn’t tell him to be careful. But he thinks: _what if he doesn’t come back?_

Which is dumb, because Lalli always comes back. Emil doesn’t know why he’s thinking about it, but he’d like to stop. If trying to sleep last night with Lalli curled under Tuuri’s bunk was hard, trying to sleep without him there is worse. And when he does, he dreams about being trapped alone in a dark place, struggling for a breath that he can’t seem to get--

Someone is talking to him. Emil can’t make out words, but the voice is calm and real, and the dark airless place isn’t.

“Um, Emil? Reynir wants to know--” That’s Swedish, and Tuuri. Emil blinks. By the dim light of the furnace, he can just make out her round, worried face, and Reynir’s, peeping out from behind the curve of her body. “--if you want to sleep with us.”

“What?!” Emil manages to keep it a strangled whisper rather than a shout, though he’s not sure why he bothers. He must still be dreaming. There’s no way she just suggested--

“You know, sleep? That thing where you close your eyes and dream and wake up six to ten hours later refreshed and rested?” A little more Icelandic, and then Tuuri says, “Reynir says it used to help, when he was scared at night, climbing into bed with one of his siblings.”

“Oh. Um.” Emil doesn’t have the energy to protest that he’s not scared. And really, if Tuuri and Reynir had been doing anything in bed at night besides sleeping, Emil would probably have known about it before now. But-- “I don’t think there’s room for me in your bunk.”

Frankly, between Reynir’s height and Tuuri’s … breadth, Emil can’t see how there’s room for both of them. They seem to manage, though.

“Well, no, but if we drag another mattress onto the floor …”

Before Emil can figure out how he agreed to this, they’re setting it up, pushing together a couple mattresses on the floor, pulling down the blankets. They’re trying to be quiet, but it’s not easy, especially when the cat has taken all this rearranging as an invitation to play hide-and-seek. Emil can’t believe that Sigrun and Mikkel are really sleeping through it all, even if the only indication of that is a brief pause in Sigrun’s snores before they start up again. They’ve both been in the military (or in Mikkel’s case, in and out of the military) for a long time. Maybe they’re used to things like this. Maybe it’s not so weird.

It’s still weird to Emil, though. He’s never shared a bed with anyone in his life, as far back as he can remember. It’s not exactly comfortable, and he’s not sure how it’s supposed to help him sleep, with Tuuri tucked in against his front, and Reynir sprawled out against his back. Somehow, though, as they fall back asleep, and he feels their slow, steady breathing, and their warmth … somehow it does.

#

Lalli comes back in the morning. He always does. After Emil’s initial, stupid surge of relief, he thinks about not going out to help with decontamination. Lalli probably doesn’t want him to, and if he does want anything from Emil--let him ask.

But refusing to do what has become part of his job isn’t going to keep Emil on Sigrun’s good side, and it’s really not going to keep him from having to answer questions that he’d rather not deal with. So he goes out and helps, and they get through it without speaking, without touching, almost without looking at each other. It’s awkward and miserable and Emil’s just going to have to get used to it.

Even though they’ve found out where they are--and the next couple of days’ travel confirm it--there’s still too much driving and not enough action for Sigrun. Emil is beginning to understand how she feels. Lalli generally sleeps through the drive, and only wakes up when they make camp in the afternoon. Even so, the atmosphere in the tank is stifling.

These days, it’s Tuuri who brings Lalli food if he doesn’t get it himself, and sits and talks to him for a little while. But she doesn’t hate Emil, and neither does Reynir, and neither does Mikkel--at least, not any more than usual. Emil hasn’t had any more nightmares, but he knows that if he does, Tuuri and Reynir won’t mind dragging the mattresses and blankets onto the floor and sleeping with him again. Which isn’t something he’s ever known about anybody before. So, really, things aren’t nearly as bad as Emil thought they would be. It’s just that every time Emil sees Lalli, his chest goes tight, and he wishes--

That he could feel Lalli’s hands moving down his body again. Or that they’d never met at all. Or that he’d never admitted to himself how he felt about Lalli, or that he could still believe that Lalli might feel the same way--something, anything, other than this.

Sometimes he catches Lalli looking at him, too. But he doesn’t know what it means. He never has, really, with Lalli.

#

Emil wakes up, not quite knowing what woke him. And Lalli is there, crouched beside his bunk, his arms wrapped around his knees and his eyes above them--not glowing, and as far as Emil can tell in the dim light just their usual pale rain-color, but so intent that Emil can almost feel the force of their scrutiny.

“I don’t understand what you want from me,” says Lalli.

Emil can’t answer. He can’t make his brain wake up fast enough. By the time he unlocks his throat enough to say, “Lalli--” he’s already gone, and Emil falls back into an uneasy slumber.

When Emil wakes up again, in the morning, he notices three things. First, Lalli is asleep under Tuuri’s bunk. Emil didn’t hear him come in. Or maybe he did. He remembers the dream he had, and realizes it wasn’t a dream. Second, Reynir is asleep in Tuuri’s bunk, but Tuuri isn’t. Sigrun’s bunk is empty, too. Third, the tank is moving.

That’s enough to get him up and into the cab, where Tuuri is driving with a slightly manic look in her eye, and Sigrun is sitting on the bench with her feet propped up on the dashboard, grinning. They’ve been passing more houses and buildings in the last few days, but now it’s nothing but houses and buildings out the window.

“We’re in Odense,” says Emil.

“Yep!” says Sigrun. “Scout came in early last night to say he’d found the place, and I had to wake up his cousin to understand what he was saying, and once she was up, and heard that, she wanted to start driving right away. I like her style, she’s crazy.”

“I waited until the sun was up!” Tuuri protests. “I’m not that crazy!”

“Suuuure you’re not, kid,” says Sigrun, thumping her on the shoulder. Then she adds in a stage whisper to Emil, “I had to sit on her.”

Tuuri pulls the tank around, through a short tunnel, and then they’re in some sort of field surrounded by a high, fence-topped wall. “Well, here we are! Base camp until we find what we’re looking for, or until it’s attacked by some weird monster that no one’s ever heard of!”

“Good job, road warrior,” says Sigrun, ruffling her hair. “Now go wake up freckles and the doc to set up camp, and you can take a nap.”

“Yes, ma’am!” With that, Tuuri dashes off into the back.

“So …” says Emil, a bit wanly. “What do you want to bet that she’s actually going to sleep?”

“No bet,” says Sigrun. “I’m surrounded by mutineers, me.”

#

It’s another couple of hours before breakfast is ready. Mikkel is cooking today, which … well. Mikkel’s cooking is terrible, but at least you know what you’re getting. Eating Reynir’s cooking is like walking into an ambush where you’re pretty sure something is waiting to kill you but you have no idea what it is.

Sigrun is sitting on one of the wheel-wells, surveying her little kingdom happily between bites of porridge. It’s a good place Lalli’s found, or at least it looks like it: roomy, defensible, open and sunlit. Mikkel says that it’s an old-world sports stadium, and also that the fences were to keep the gladiators from escaping, but Emil figures that at least half the random facts he comes up with are bullshit, although a couple of them have turned out to be surprisingly accurate.

Reynir gets two bowls of porridge and disappears into the tank, so Tuuri’s probably not asleep after all. Emil goes up to get his own, but when he does, he sees Lalli sprawled out on one of the crumbling concrete benches that ring the field. He’s got one arm flung over his eyes against the sunlight, and the other is hanging off the bench, fingertips grazing the ground. He looks … comfortable. Happy.

Why should Lalli get to be happy when Emil is miserable? Except that he’s beautiful like that, and it fills something in Emil’s heart just looking at him, and he wants to do it all day, and not ruin it by going over and trying to talk to him. But he does owe Lalli an answer to his question. Even if it wasn’t exactly a question.

So he goes over and sits on the ground, leaning his head against the bench. “Nothing,” he says.

Lalli lifts his arm a little off his eyes so he can look at Emil, and makes a small inquisitive noise in his throat.

“What I want of you. If you don’t want it. You don’t--” _owe me._ “I don’t--” _expect._ Emil doesn’t have the words he needs, but damned if he’s going to go get Tuuri. Instead, he repeats, “Nothing. I know I did bad. I just--don't be mad on me? When you're mad, I--I'm injured.” No, stupid, and way too melodramatic. “I mean I'm--”

“Sad?” Lalli suggests.

“Yes. But not just--I mean--” Emil is flailing, and Lalli is just--looking at him.

Finally, Lalli says, “You're _ikävöinyt minua?_ ” It’s soft and hesitant, not things Emil is used to hearing from Lalli.

“Ikävöinyt?” says Emil.

“Like …” Lalli is quiet again for a long time, and then he says, “When you think of your home. And it’s far away.”

Emil has to swallow hard, because the word Lalli has given him is painfully right. “Yes. I missing.”

“I miss you,” Lalli corrects him.

“I miss you,” Emil repeats in a hoarse whisper.

Lalli gives his whole body a shake, like he does sometimes when he’s gone out on too little sleep and he has to force himself to concentrate on the mission. “Okay. But you really were injured. Because of me.”

“What? No!” Is that what Lalli’s been thinking this whole time? “It was my fault, remember? Anyway, I’m fine, Mikkel says so.”

“Good. Next time you won’t be.” Lalli has drawn up his knees, made himself smaller. “You don’t understand. I’m supposed to be good. I can’t make mistakes. And you _häiritset_ me.”

“Häiritset?” Although Emil has a pretty good idea of what it means. Tuuri warned him from the start: Lalli doesn’t have a lot of patience for people who annoy him.

“I think about you,” says Lalli. “When I shouldn’t.”

“Oh.” Well, that doesn’t sound like _annoy_ , exactly. Emil finds himself smiling, absurdly pleased. “By my mind, you can think from me how much you want.”

Lalli uncurls just a little. His eyebrows fly up and a muscle in his cheek jumps. “Tyhmä.”

“Tyhmä?”

“You,” says Lalli.

Well, if Lalli doesn’t want to tell him, Emil knows perfectly well that he isn’t going to be able to drag it out of him. He could ask Tuuri later, but he thinks he won’t. This way, he’ll be able to keep believing it’s a compliment. And he made Lalli laugh, anyway.

There’s a scream from inside the tank, and Emil is halfway to his feet before it occurs to him that there’s not likely to be anything dangerous in there, and Tuuri--

“Hey, shrieky!” Sigrun calls. “Was that a scared scream or an excited scream?”

Tuuri’s head pops out of the tank. “Sigrun! Sigrunsigrunsigrun! I got someone on the radio!”

“What? Hot damn!”

“It’s not the base at Mora, sorry, but it’s a naval ship, and they might be able to pass on a message or even arrange a pickup, and we’re _not stranded anymore_ , probably, and her name’s Captain Solberg, and she says she knows you and she wants to talk to you!”

“Ha! I wonder what old flat-nose has been up to!” Sigrun swings inside the tank with a single stride, and Mikkel abandons his porridge and follows her, whether because he doesn’t trust her to arrange things properly, or out of simple nosiness, Emil can’t be sure. Either way, he’s acutely conscious of that fact that he and Lalli are alone now.

Maybe Lalli is, too, because he picks that moment to say, “I’m sorry, too.”

It takes Emil a second to realize that he said it in Swedish.

“Um.” Emil wants to say that it’s okay, except that some of the things Lalli said really weren’t. And also, Emil’s not about to start crying, because what possible reason is there for that? “Thanks,” is what he can manage. Maybe it’s enough.

“But,” says Lalli, back in Finnish, small and curled inward again, “I don’t think I can be what you want.”

“You are what I want,” says Emil without hesitation. Then he wants to smack himself, because he’s supposed to be telling Lalli that he doesn’t want anything from him. And it’s true, in a way. But so is what he just said. “No, you are good. Good in scouting, and good in magic, and good in, um.” He makes a hand gesture, and feels himself blushing down to his toes.

Lalli might--just might--be a little pink himself. “Naiminen,” he suggests.

“Naiminen,” Emil repeats. He’s just going to have to hope that the word means what he thinks it means, because there’s no _way_ he’s asking Tuuri. “But you are also--you are Lalli. It's more good than being good. It's what I--” Okay, it’s a good thing that Emil doesn’t know the Finnish word for love, because if he did he would definitely be blurting it out right now. “Sorry. I know you never ask from me--”

“Emil.” Lalli’s not curled inward now, not tense exactly, just … still. Intent. Like he can’t afford to get this wrong. “I’m asking.”

“Yes,” says Emil. What a good word. What does he need with any others, when he has that one? He reaches for Lalli’s hand where it’s dangling off the bench. Lalli’s fingers are cold, and they start trembling when Emil touches them. How did he not know? He brings Lalli’s hand to his mouth and kisses the palm, and Lalli traces his fingers down Emil’s face: _poski, leuka, kaula_. And Emil says it again: “Yes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finnish words and phrases in this chapter!
> 
> Anteeksi = I’m sorry  
> Ikävöinyt minua = missed me  
> Häiritset = distract  
> Tyhmä = stupid (we had that one last chapter, but I figured I’d put it in again--Emil doesn’t remember it, and you might not either.)  
> Naiminen = fucking  
> Poski = cheek  
> Leuka = chin  
> Kaula = neck

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [tumblr](http://minutia-r.tumblr.com/) if you want to see what I get up to elsewhere on the internet.


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